I may be excited about Apollo for different reasons than most Flash developers out there. Bringing Flash to the desktop opens up a lot of possibilities, but it’s nothing new. Tools like SWF Studio, Zinc, and mProjector have been doing it for years. What I’m really excited about is being able to build applications using HTML and Ajax.
Seldom do I get feedback on the projects I create, so it’s very gratifying to see Sploder being used in a school environment to exercise kids’ creativity. Zanpo has been explored by classes in the past as well. I’d love to be able to do more of this – making virtual ecosystems where children can learn and explore. The real difficulty is making a safe environment for kids on the internet that isn’t too restrictive.
I could see the possibility of creating a site where schools or school systems could sign up and create their own encapsulated subdomains that they could offer to their teachers and moderate. If only I had the time to build such a system!
A couple of months ago, Google posted several job openings for designers. It seems that we’re starting to see the fruits of their labor. Google has added a few themes to their personalized home page. There’s not many there yet, but what is there is fairly nice.
The neatest feature is where you can enter your zip code, and the image in the top banner will change according to time of day (not sure about weather). My theme is tea house. I wonder if they will ever allow us to upload our own themes? Or, perhaps someone will write a Firefox extension that will allow us to change it ourselves.
Picklish est mort, vive le Picklish! I’ve decided to roll Slideroll hosting features into Picklish, so it has been rebranded Slideroll Gallery AV. It’s still free, and still has all the great features, plus more. This release (0.7b) adds the ability to save and reload galleries on your computer, easy publishing to Slideroll, change border colors, and – my favorite feature – record audio narration along with your photos. That last feature is PC only.
Powered by WordPress
